Sixty Stories

With these audacious and murderously witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupations of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are the urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings, dreams, and angsts.

Leaving the Atocha Station

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's 'research' becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections?

The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.

Faces in the Crowd

A young mother in Mexico City, captive to a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a house she cannot abandon or fully occupy, writes a novel of her days as a translator living in New York. A young translator, adrift in Harlem, is desperate to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Mexican poet who lived in Harlem during the 1920s and whose ghostly presence haunts her in the city's subways. And Gilberto Owen, dying in Philadelphia in the 1950s, convinced he is slowly disappearing, recalls his heyday decades before.

Don Quixote: Translated by Edith Grossman

Sixteenth-century Spanish gentleman Don Quixote, fed by his own delusional fantasies, takes to the road in search of chivalrous adventures. But his quest leads to more trouble than triumph. At once humorous, romantic, and sad, Don Quixote is a literary landmark. This fresh edition, by award-winning translator Edith Grossman, brings the tale to life as never before.

The Big Sleep

Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. But with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out - and that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.

The Sellout: A Novel

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.

The Crying of Lot 49

Quite unexpectedly, Mrs. Oedipa Maas finds herself the executor of the estate of Pierce Inverarity, a man she used to know in a more-or-less intimate fashion. When Oedipa heads off to Southern California to sort through Pierce's affairs, she becomes ensnared in a hilarious and puzzling worldwide conspiracy.

Zero K

Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to lives of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.

Bluebeard: The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.

Between the World and Me

"This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race", a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men.

Audible Editor Reviews

"It's no easy task to bring to life the words of one of the most celebrated post-modern fiction writers who influenced a generation of novelists. When the focus of a story is on wordplay and sentence fragments as it is in Donald Barthleme's best work - including this short novel The Dead Father - it's all too easy for the genius to be lost in narration. But Dennis Holland rises to the challenge and succeeds. His technique? A matter-of-fact cadence, with a bit of playfulness that softly highlights the absurd. It's this hint of wonder in his voice that lands his aural rendering somewhere between a dedicated teacher reading aloud from a manual and the narrator of the Dr. Seuss movie classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

"The Dead Father offers a world so absurd, that the absurdity is normal. The title character is a mostly-conscious, part-machine being who, though he speaks and acts and reasons, is, apparently, dead, and on one last journey. Fragments and simple sentences move the book along; everything is at once related and unrelated, as in this passage: 'They continue to hold hands. And the Dead Father also gropes a bare foot with the hand that is not holding hands. Julie retracts foot. Thomas smokes. Events in the sky. Star falls, scattering in the dark part. Clouds moving implacably left to right. Offstage, toward the wings. Thomas smoking.' And though the words alone may seem devoid of emotion, the novel ends in a heartbreaking scene - emotional because of the words and the events, but also because of the gentle narration that both pushes the narrative and floats along with its tide. Holland's performance of The Dead Father offers both an excellent introduction to a fiction master's work, and a fresh perspective for Barthleme devotees." (Kelly Marages)

Publisher's Summary

The Dead Father is a gargantuan half-dead, half-alive, part mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself - even while he is being dragged by means of a cable toward a mysterious goal.

In this extraordinary novel, marked by the imaginative use of language that influenced a generation of fiction writers, Donald Barthelme offered a glimpse into his fictional universe.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Donald Barthelme's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Tracy Daugherty about the life and work of Donald Barthelme – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

When I was an undergrad, The Dead Father is the only postmodernist work I really understood and loved, and it helped me laugh at traditions of all kinds. I teach this novel in my classes now, and the students think it's like nothing they've seen before (if they can get past the antinomial cussing, sex, and "nudity" all of which are absurdly rendered). Yet there are heart wrenching themes about the problems fathers and sons face as they struggle to communicate or even just coexist. Barthelme continues to make me laugh and think each time I read it or any of his works. Still a great read, and the audio narrator adds an extra layer of absurdity and tenderness to the piece.

If what you enjoy is a straightforward narrative told in straightforward prose, turn around now. Barthelme is unapologetically post-modernist in approach and outlook, and in the case of "The Dead Father," introduces a healthy dose of surrealism as well. The Dead Father is an enormous figure being dragged towards some little-explained destination. He's dead. But he's not. He is a symbolic figure, at times even a mythic figure--he creates a new god just by sticking one eye in a river.

Much of the book is snatches of dialogue, sometimes in clear context, sometimes nearly incoherent. Which is actually why it lends itself to the audiobook format, at least in the hands of a reader prepared to piece out which remark belongs to which character. Dennis Holland does a superb job of interpreting a very challenging text, and the listener owes him for his work in helping us through the work. The reading reminded very much of Nick Sullivan's outstanding reading of William Gaddis' "J.R.," and if you appreciate Gaddis' humor, you are well prepared to enjoy Barthelme's. There are moments of such wonderful wordplay and verbal juxtapositions that I burst out laughing.

While this isn't one of my top 10 audiobooks, it's one I'm very satisfied to have purchased and listened to.